This Blog is dedicated to reportage and analysis of Civil Commercial Laws and Litigation, including Intellectual Property Laws. Follow @jsaideepak on Twitter for updates. Subscribe to thedemandingmistress@googlegroups.com

Monday, October 1, 2012

Super-specialized Treatment of IP Law: Is it Good?

In my limited years of practice,
the one thing that has struck me as odd is the treatment of Intellectual Property
Law as a super-specialized branch, to the extent that IP practitioners are
seldom seen as regular lawyers by "general practitioners".

What is funnier is that even
within the practice of IP law, patent practitioners are seen as outsiders to
the law by copyright and trademark lawyers. Terms such as "fancy
litigation"/"luxury litigation" have been pejoratively used to
refer to IP litigation (I have earlier
written about the prevalent stereotype about IP litigators not being
particularly comfortable with Court procedure).

In the process of practicing the
law of "exclusive exclusionary rights", the exclusive practice of IP
law may have become an island to the detriment of the subject and its
practitioners.

This, I presume, is partly
because of excessive emphasis on how "peculiar and different" IP law
is from other property laws. The net result being, that sometimes it is
forgotten that IP rights are property rights, albeit of a different nature, which
may be better understood and leveraged if studied as part of the larger gamut
of commercial and corporate laws. I think it would also help to teach the subject as part of corporate laws to law students, instead of treating it as a marginal elective.

This is also necessary in order
to offer greater value to clients who may prefer engaging the services of a
practitioner who understands the role played by IP in commercial transactions,
instead of one whose expertise is limited to a small niche like patents or
copyrights, and whose fundamentals in other aspects of commercial law/litigation
are wobbly and unreliable.

In order to dispel this stereotype
and address it in a positive way, I intend to connect IP law to as many
areas of "general commercial/corporate law" as possible. I sincerely
hope that readers of this blog do not perceive this initiative as dilution of the blog's
theme, and encourage this effort.